There has been a swirl of activity in the LENR field in the past two weeks, thanks primarily to two conferences.

NIWeek 2012 (National Instruments’ annual exposition, held this year in Austin, Texas from August 6-9) featured an LENR panel, three speakers on the topic and a demonstration by Dr. Francesco Celani of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Frascati, Italy).

National Instruments co-founder and CEO, Dr. James Truchard, discussed cold fusion in his keynote speech (@15:11): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxjxFdFEBsw. Truchard noted that National Instruments has been involved in the cold fusion field since 1989, with its LabView software: “[I]n 1989 we were working with some of these early Edisons and we actually offered everybody who wanted to prove cold fusion existed a copy of LabView and everybody who wanted to prove it didn’t exist a copy of LabView. And as far as I know, only the ones trying to prove it took us up on the offer. So we actually did a AppNote of how to do cold fusion with LabView.”

On August 8, the following individual LENR presentations took place [see partial video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG5FKjibgAw ]: John Hadjichristos, “Defining a New Source of Energy”; Akito Takahashi, “Status of CMNS/CF/LENR Research at Kobe-Technova” and Robert Godes, “Commercialization of LENR Technology.”

Also on August 8, Duncan joined National Instruments’ software architect Greg Morrow and National Instruments’ Director of Software Marketing Shelly Gretlein for a short discussion on “Anomalous Heat Effects.” See the video by clicking on the title of the talk (under the date and names above): http://www.ni.com/niweek/keynote_videos.htm

The 17th International Conference on Cold Fusion (ICCF17) began on August 13 in Daejeon, South Korea (tutorial, optional tour and welcome reception were held from August 10 to 12).

The meeting opened with Dr. Michael McKubre memorializing Dr. Martin Fleischmann, who passed away on August 3. McKubre’s full memorial will appear in IE #105; he said, in part, to his cold fusion colleagues at ICCF17: “[Martin] was the most highly innovative person I ever knew. Without Martin this community very likely would not exist—and we would not be here. What Martin excelled at was effective creativity. Ignorance is an aid to creativity, if you don’t know what has gone before, but it is not constructive and makes no progress. You need deep wisdom, acquired through study and training to know what already is. You also need a polished skill set to advance your intuition. Martin had both. Martin was also very efficient—the Pablo Picasso of physical chemistry…”

The plenary lecture of Dr. Frank Gordon and Dr. Sunwon Park, co-chairs of the event, is available in print form at: ICCF17 Plenary Lecture.

Dr. Celani has a demonstration set up at this conference as well. Conference chairman Sunwon Park issued a press release on August 14, stating in part: “A working ‘cold fusion’ cell invented by Italian Professor Francesco Celani is on display this week…Prof. Celani’s cell uses a specially prepared wire in a hydrogen gas environment to produce more output energy than predicted. The results are measured with state of the art instrumentation provided by the National Instruments Corporation with technical support from the Seoul office.” Celani’s ICCF17 paper is now available: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CelaniFcunimnallo.pdf

Defkalion Green Technologies presented on their Hyperion device.

This is a short overview of the happenings at NIWeek and ICCF17. More detailed reports will follow.